“It isn’t that simple, Ma,” I spoke over her words. In the kitchen, the sounds of water and steel clashing stopped and when I didn’t say anything else the sounds resumed.
There was silence while Lata and Sowmya piled rinsed steel plates and glasses and ladles into the plastic tub for Parvati to wash the next morning.
I helped Sowmya carry the plastic tub outside into the back yard.
“Now what?” I asked unsteadily.
Sowmya just smiled. “Now we will have a family Mahabharatam .”
I leaned against the cement base of the tulasi plant, not too keen on going back inside. The tension was flowing out of the house in small waves slowly coming together to form a tornado. I plucked a tulasi leaf and put it inside my mouth to stop tasting the rising bile of fear.
“They’re going to kick me out or they’re going to tie me up and marry me to this Adarsh fellow,” I said. “What if they don’t want to ever see me again?” I asked, my eyes filling yet again. “Will they just let me go?”
Sowmya took her hand in mine. “No,” she said. “No one will let you go. They will be angry with you for a while but they will come around.”
Lata came outside and asked if everything was okay.
“She is scared,” Sowmya said sympathetically.
“So she should be,” Lata said. “Once your mother gets over the shock, she is going to beat you within an inch of your life.”
I sighed.
“And your Thatha is . . . Well, he is going to watch,” Lata continued with a grin. “At least it is done. Now you can let what has to happen, happen.”
“Let’s go inside,” Sowmya suggested. “Otherwise they’ll think that you ran away.”
Running away sounded like a real good idea, right about now.
Everyone was sitting in the living room when we came back in. There was still no sign of Nanna. He never just left without telling anyone where he was going, no matter how upset he was or how big the fight he’d had with Ma. This was unusual but then it wasn’t every day his favorite daughter not only broke his dreams but walked all over them with pointed shoes as well. Even though this was my life and I knew in my head that I had to live it the way I wanted to, I couldn’t shrug the guilt away. It was there, rock solid, without give. And there was another form of guilt, the guilt for feeling guilty in the first place. Nick was part of my life, the man who had accepted all my flaws and I was feeling guilty about loving him, living with him. I was wishing, in a small corner of my mind, that he didn’t exist in my life so that I could marry Adarsh or some other sap like him and not have this conflict with my parents.
“So we’ll tell the Sarmas that you are saying yes, right?” Ma was agitated and her face was flushed, her tone flustered. She was scared, I realized, afraid that I had actually meant what I said about an American boyfriend. My heart went out to her. Like Sowmya, she was trying her best to make Nick go away.
“No, Ma, we can’t,” I said, and sat down beside her.
She slapped me across the face and tears streaked down her cheeks. “How could you, Priya? We taught you well . . . we raised you right and . . . How could you, Priya?”
I buried my face in my hands. This was just as bad as I had thought it would be. I stemmed my tears by pressing my eyes with my hands.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Ma, facing her with clear eyes. “I didn’t plan to fall in love with Nick, it just happened. And I can’t just marry someone else. I don’t want to marry anyone but Nick.”
“Then you should have said something earlier,” Jayant said, looking just as agitated now as Ma. “What will we tell the Sarmas? You have put us all in an embarrassing situation.”
I wanted to remind them all that they had forced the pelli-chupulu on me, that I was not to blame for that, but I couldn’t because a part of me blamed myself. I knew that if I had told them about Nick earlier, they would’ve put a stop to it. Even if Ma and Thatha wouldn’t, I knew my father definitely would have.
“You have shamed us,” Ammamma added her two cents. “An American? At least Anand married an Indian . . . but you have just ruined our good name. It is not too late, Priya. Forget this American, Nicku-Bicku, and marry that Sarma boy. Good boys like him don’t come around all the time.”
I waited for Thatha to say something but he was not saying a word. He was sitting as rigidly as he had before, looking into space. I wished he would say something, anything. The two people who I had been most afraid of hurting were hurt and they were the two who were saying the least; in fact, they had said nothing.
“When are you planning to marry this Nicku person?” Ma asked.
“Sometime this year,” I said. “I know you don’t approve—”
“Approve?” Ma charged at me. “You don’t care if we approve. You don’t care if our names are dragged through the mud. You are a selfish girl, Priya, only caring about yourself. We should never have let you go to America without marriage. Your father and I were too soft and you have taken advantage of us.”
It was not like that hadn’t crossed my mind and because it had, guilt, which was already lying heavily on me, increased in weight.
Several of my classmates from engineering school in India had married “boys” in the United States, while I and a few others had not. Our parents had not insisted that marriage be a criterion for leaving their home. They could have made it an issue but they hadn’t. They had trusted me to take care of myself, to not fall in love with some foreigner, and I had betrayed their trust. That was what Ma had said when she had talked about Anand marrying Neelima, “What can we do when someone takes your trust and throws it away?” And I had done exactly that.
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I cried out. “Ma, these things happen. I’m sorry that you don’t approve, that you feel I’ve betrayed you, but this is my life and I have to live my life, you can’t live it for me. I have to be happy and I can’t let you be happy for me. And for me to be happy, I need to marry Nick. It’s that simple.”
“Nothing is that simple,” Thatha finally spoke. “You think your marriage to a foreigner is going to be all roses?”
I shook my head. “All relationships have problems. That’s a fact of life.”
“But this relationship will have more problems than most,” Thatha said assuredly. “You obviously will not have any support from your family. I don’t know about his family but I am sure they are not completely happy about this. How can they be?”
“But they are, Thatha,” I said. “They are. Nick’s family loves me. They accept me and don’t notice that I’m Indian.”
“Then they are being dishonest,” Thatha said confidently. He couldn’t fathom that a world existed where people didn’t notice skin color and differentiate on its basis.
“They will never accept you completely,” Thatha declared. “And what will you be left with then? A marriage to a man who your family, your world, doesn’t accept and his family accepts you, but reluctantly. I promise you that if you get married to this American, your marriage will end in divorce.”
I was shocked at his cruelty. It was cruel to tell me that my impending marriage had no chance of survival. It was cruel to tell me that he would abandon me if I married Nick. It was cruel and unkind and he hit all the marks he wanted to strike with his words.
“Then it will be a risk I must take,” I said bravely and got up. “Do you want me to leave your house now?”
“Priya!” Ma exclaimed.
Thatha shook his head. “No. You are still my granddaughter.”
I nodded.
“It will never work, Priya. You cannot make mango pickle with tomatoes,” he warned. “You cannot mesh two cultures without making a mess of it. I say this because I love you. Forget about this American. They are not our people. They will never understand us. Marry Adarsh. He is a good boy and it will make your family happy.”
I shook my head.
“No, no . . .” Thatha said with a tight smile. “Don’t make any rash decisions
. Take your time to think about it. We don’t have to say anything to Sarma-garu until tomorrow afternoon.”
I didn’t bother to tell him that I was not going to change my mind. Like my father had just a while ago, I walked out of Thatha’s house into the warm night. No one called out after me to warn me how dangerous it was to be out at night, but it was just nine o’clock and the sky was still not completely black; hints of the sun still lurked in crimson streaks around sparse sickly clouds.
I went to the telephone booth from where I had called Nick just a few hours ago and dialed my parents’ home number. Nate picked up the phone on the fourth ring.
I was sobbing and couldn’t get any words out.
Nate was in front of the telephone booth on his motorbike within twenty minutes of my hysterical phone call. It was a Yamaha, which my father and paternal grandfather had given him for his eighteenth birthday a year ago against Ma’s vehement objection. She was convinced that Nate would die in an accident on his Yamaha and hated it with a passion. I had shipped a helmet for him, which had annoyed Ma because she thought I was encouraging him but had pleased her as well, because she knew a helmet would keep her son safe.
“I know this great place where they serve very good ice cream,” Nate said when I sat behind him on the bike.
“Nate, drive carefully or we’ll die,” I all but shrieked when Nate started driving on the bumpy roads of Hyderabad. Maybe Ma had a point!
The ice cream parlor was a cozy copy of a ’50s Hollywood movie. There was a jukebox, a red jalopy in a corner, and Enrique Iglesias was telling some woman she couldn’t escape his love at the top of his weepy lungs.
“Nate,” I said mortified, “You’ve brought me to some teenage hangout?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I thought you’d like to meet Tara.”
I sniffled. “Tara?”
“My girl . . .”
“I know who Tara is,” I said, not wanting him to think I had forgotten. “But I’m all blubbery and she’ll think I’m a weepy hag.”
“She already does,” Nate said with a wink, and waved at a pretty girl sitting at a table right ahead of us. “Isn’t she lovely?” he asked dramatically in a fake British accent.
“Yes, dear,” I said with a grin. This was a side of Nate I had never seen before and it was charming.
“Hi, I am Tara,” Tara said enthusiastically.
“Hello, Priya,” I said, unsure of what I was supposed to say to her. I held out my hand and she shook it.
“So, how are you doing?” Tara asked. “Are your parents mad as hell about your American fiancé?”
Well, she sure got to the point, I thought critically. Now, as an older sister, it was my job to dislike any woman/girl Nate liked, was involved with, and/or wanted to marry
“Screw them,” Tara said before I could respond. “You’ve got one life . . . no second chances, you know. Kis-kis ka khyaal rakhenge, haan? Who, who will we keep happy? So we have to make choices. You have to keep you happy.”
“It isn’t that simple,” I repeated what I had been telling Ma all evening.
“Of course not, that would make it too easy,” she said with a grin. “So, Nate tells me that you love pista kulfi. They make a wicked kulfi here. Why don’t I get you one while you tell Nate what you think about me?”
Nate looked at me, his eyebrows raised. “She’s very nervous. She blabs when she’s nervous.”
“She seems super-duper confident to me,” I said. “And perky as hell,” I added.
Nate’s face fell. “You don’t like her.”
I smiled. “I don’t know her and I have yet to make up my mind. So far so good.”
Tara came back with kulfi for everyone and I got a chance to see how Nate was with a woman. It was a learning experience. He was so much my father in the way he talked and carried himself, always well behaved, always the gentleman.
“I don’t want to argue about this, Tara,” he said when Tara insisted that Nate wanted to go to the United States to do his masters.
“Well, why not,” I said, finishing the kulfi. “It’s a very beautiful place and you could do your masters in a really nice school there.”
“See,” Tara said, and put her hand on Nate’s. “ Arrey, yaar, it will be mast, a lot of fun.”
“Why can’t I just stay in India?” Nate asked belligerently. “Not everyone wants to run and join the Americans, yaar. I definitely don’t.”
“Well, I do,” Tara said.
“Then you should find a nice boy. . . . Hey, why don’t we hook her up with Adarsh Sarma?” Nate suggested jokingly and Tara threw her paper napkin at him.
“You dog,” she complained. “But I can come and visit you, right, Priya?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
They were so young, I thought. So very young! Was I ever that young? When I was in college, I didn’t have any boyfriends. Well, I did have a crush on someone once in a while but no relationships. I had friends. Even now I had a good relationship with a couple of boys I went to engineering college with. With other classmates my relationship was limited to an occasional phone call.
I never had the easygoing teenage years that Nate was indulging in. There were no teenage hangouts, none that I visited, nor was Britney Spears part of my vocabulary. In fact, when I was in India I didn’t know much about the pop music of the United States. Nate and Tara were aware of it all, their feet tapped to the music and Tara hummed to the lyrics. This was already another generation and in this generation girls could meet boys at a place like this after nine in the night. My mother would’ve hung me out to dry if I had tried to leave the house this late and especially to meet a boy.
“My parents adore Nate,” Tara told me. “They think he is amazing. They want to meet your parents but Nate keeps avoiding it. But sooner or later, Nate, it will have to happen.”
Nate shifted in his red plastic chair uncomfortably.
“You wouldn’t like our mother,” I said, and thought that Ma would simply hate Tara. Tara was what Ma would call a girl without a mother.
When Nate flipped through television channels to land on MTV, Ma would look at the gyrating, bikini-clad women in the videos and shake her head. “If you had shown up on television like that,” she told me, “I would skin you alive. These girls . . . cheechee, they don’t have mothers; if they did, no mother, no mother and I don’t care which country she is from, would allow this.”
Tara definitely fell in the no-mother category in her tight yellow blouse and small black skirt. She wasn’t different from a typical girl her age in the U.S. but for me it was a shock to see how much things had changed here in India. When I was this young, there was no way I could’ve walked out of my mother’s house alive wearing what she was wearing. Ma would never have permitted me to bring a boyfriend home or even to have one to start with.
Nate and Tara were holding hands, touching each other with a familiarity I had not experienced until I met Nick. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that these two teenagers had had sex, even though it would make me queasy.
Yes, this was a different generation and they made me uneasy with their progressive ways. But who was I to speak? I was planning to marry an American who I’d been living in sin with for the past two years. I most probably made my parents’ generation queasy with what they thought were my progressive ways.
“I’m going to put some money in the jukebox,” Tara said, and walked toward the glittering music box.
“She is nice,” I said because I knew Nate wanted me to like her.
“Yes, she is,” Nate said. “Ma will absolutely hate her.”
“Yes,” I nodded, and we both laughed.
“You feeling better?” Nate asked.
I grinned and patted his hand. “This was a good idea, Nate. Thanks. I feel better. Thatha was . . . brutal. He said that we can’t make mango pickle with tomatoes, that if I married Nick, our marriage would end in divorce.”
“It could,” Nate said. “There are no guarantee
s.”
“I know. So, are you planning to marry this girl without a mother?” I asked, not wanting to dwell on my impending marriage and divorce as Thatha would like to have it.
Nate laughed. “Before I take her to meet Ma, I really need to get her into a decent salwar kameez.”
Tara was definitely an independent woman of the twenty-first century. She zipped home on a white Kinetic Honda, waving, even as I gasped at her speed and lack of a helmet.
“She will be fine,” Nate said when I voiced my concern, feeling like my mother. “She is always careful and . . . won’t wear a helmet, messes up her hair, she says.”
Nate and I drove to Tankbund instead of Thatha’s house and sat down on one of the benches, right next to the statue of Krishnadeva Raya, the great king of the Deccan.
Krishnadeva Raya was part of my childhood; part of my knowledge of Indian history and mythology, of Thatha telling me rich, vivid stories of the king and his wise court jester, Tenali Raman. They were fables, part of folklore that had traveled generations to be revealed to me and hopefully to my children through me.
Thatha would sit me on his lap out on the veranda swing. He would fold one leg, which I would sit on, and keep the other leg on the floor to keep the swing in motion. He would then tell me a story.
My favorite was the story where corrupt Brahmins try to swindle the king and both the king and the Brahmins are taught a lesson by Tenali Raman.
I would make Thatha tell me the story again and again of how, when the king’s mother dies without her last wish of eating a ripe mango fulfilled, Krishnadeva Raya is filled with guilt and fear that his mother’s atma is wandering around the earth because of an unfulfilled desire. The court priest, a horrible Brahmin, decides to take advantage of the grief-stricken king and tells him, “Since the Queen Mother died without eating a mango, her soul is lost, crying for closure.” Thatha would say this in a sad quiet voice, imitating the Brahmin.
The king would then ask in Thatha’s humble voice, “Mangoes were out of season, there was nothing I could do. What should I do, O great Pandit, to make this right?”
The Mango Season Page 16